Recent reviews by LenientFrog

Well, this is the peak of the Hitman formula: Huge (!) sandbox levels, a lot of them, too, with countless ways to assassinate your targets, offering a lot of replayability.

Interestingly, because the game is so open, I'd argue there are more fun ways and less fun ways to play it. The less fun way is to always go for perfect runs, restarting (or worse, reloading a save) on any mistake. The much more fun way, I think, is to live with your mistakes and to improvize in order to still win the mission. *This* is IMHO peak Hitman and very exciting as well as gratifying, but the game never really incentivized this playstyle.

I think the developers realized this long ago when they added the elusive targets system, but I think it was never a good solution. The new freelancer mode, however, which turns Hitman into a roguelike, does it so much better, and is a lot of fun. It still has its share of problems, though, e.g. the repetitive nature of identifying targets in the showdown missions, and I think it punishes casual players a bit too harshly by making you lose half your cash and all the items you bring on a mission in case of death (well, you can Alt+F4 on major mistakes, giving you a chance to replay the mission, and no one would blame you for doing so while learning the ropes of this new way of playing the game).

Still, even without freelancer, this package was already worth its price many times over, and I have sunk over 200 hours into the three games that are here repackaged into one. Now, with freelancer, we are getting a very good first iteration of how I think the Hitman formula can and should evolve, and it keeps me engaged. I am looking forward to many future improvements to this mode.

My biggest gripe with the game is that it has no business whatsoever to force us to be always online while playing.

For me, KING Art's games bring back the good old times where I loved playing titles like Monkey Island or Simon the Sorcerer... a time I thought was long gone. I recently completed The Book of Unwritten Tales (and its extension, the Critter Chronicles). A great game with very likable characters, a very nice art style and a superb voice acting performance.

This title here certainly lives up to its predecessor. I played through chapter one so far and laughed out loud several times while doing so... that does not happen often for me in video games :-).

Took me around five hours. As the full version will have five chapters, this title seems to have even more content than the first game had. And, judging from the chapter release dates so far, I am confident that this title will indeed be out of early access pretty soon.

At one point, I had some technical issues resulting in the game stuck with no further interaction possible. Luckily, I could fix the problem by changing the graphic quality from high to low and then back to high again. I am confident these problems will be resolved in the full version.

If you like adventures, you should definitely buy this game.